Aquinas ‘family’ prepares for major changes on the horizon

Aquinas College senior Veronica Kitzhaber is pictured in front of Siena Hall, where she was a resident assistant during the last school year. She graduates May 13 and is contemplating a vocation to religious life. Photos by Theresa Laurence

When Aquinas College senior and resident assistant Veronica Kitzhaber became the second person to move into Siena Hall last fall, she was filled with hopeful excitement about what the newly opened dorm would mean for the college. From designing residence life policies to nurturing a strong on-campus group of residents, “it felt like we were creating things for the future,” she said.

Instead, as the school year winds down and the first students to move into Siena Hall become the last students to move out, Kitzhaber and her fellow Aquinas classmates will leave behind a very different college than the one they entered.

When Aquinas College announced in early March that it would undergo a major restructuring after the end of the 2016-2017 academic year, “I was very surprised,” said Kitzhaber.

To freshman Alex Fallon, the news “didn’t seem right, it still doesn’t seem right. It wasn’t just a school, Aquinas was a home,” he said.

The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, who run three schools on the Dominican Campus – Aquinas, St. Cecilia Academy, and Overbrook School – announced in March that “after careful discernment of factors involving financial challenges and related issues,” they had decided “to reconfigure Aquinas College so that its focus will be that of preparing teachers to serve the Church in its mission of education.”

Aquinas College freshman Alex Fallon, a member of the House of Blessed Jordan of Saxony, plans to transfer to the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio to complete his business degree.

Starting next semester, Aquinas will no longer offer degree programs in the arts and sciences, business or nursing, and it will no longer offer residential services or student life programming. Aquinas administrators expect about 15-20 lay students to continue to study in the School of Education, alongside about 50 Dominican Sisters.

These changes mean that about 60 of 76 Aquinas faculty and staff members will lose their jobs and about 140 students will have to complete their degrees elsewhere.

Fallon, from upstate New York, is one of those students who will have to transfer; he plans to enroll at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, to pursue a degree in the business program. A number of other Aquinas students are also transferring to Steubenville, which is similar to Aquinas in its small size and strong Catholic identity.

Aquinas students are also transferring to the Catholic University of America, the University of Dallas, and Cumberland University in Lebanon, among others.

Fallon, now an enthusiastic cheerleader for Aquinas, initially thought it was too small and didn’t have what he was looking for in a college experience. But after a visit to the campus, he clicked with students, decided to enroll, and the community quickly became like a family to him.

“I absolutely loved it here at Aquinas,” Fallon said. “The friendships that I made here will be friendships that I will have for the rest of my life.”

The school’s administrators and faculty members, Fallon said, “really care about you as an individual and they don’t look at you as just a number on a piece of paper.”

Kitzhaber, who transferred to Aquinas after attending community college in her home state of Wisconsin, said her connection to students on campus “was addictive and instantaneous.” She immediately felt “a different joy than you see on other campuses,” one that was positive and faith-centered.

Kitzhaber will graduate May 13 with a degree in elementary education and is contemplating her vocation with a religious order. “My plan is different than a lot of other graduates,” she said, but one she felt totally comfortable exploring at Aquinas.

The tight-knit, faith-filled atmosphere of Aquinas drew a small but passionate group of new students to campus every year, but ultimately wasn’t enough to propel Aquinas forward as a traditional liberal arts college.

The Dominican Sisters said they had to make the difficult decision to reconfigure the college “after a process of careful discernment, as we considered the college’s long and persistent history of difficulties in finances, fluctuating enrollment, and development, as well as other complexities related to operating a traditional college in today’s world.”

They determined that “there is no viable long-term solution which would adequately support a traditional college with residential and student life without placing both the college and the congregation at serious financial risk.”

And so, Aquinas College, in a sense, will come full circle, back to its roots with a sole focus on Catholic education. “We were founded to be educators,” Sister Thomas More, O.P., vice president of academics for Aquinas College, said of her order. “Providing education for sisters was the original intent, and we are coming back to that.”

When Aquinas begins the 2017-2018 school year, it will focus its academic programming on the School of Education and on course offerings in philosophy and theology. It will continue operating the Center for Catholic Education, which serves Catholic elementary and secondary schools by providing spiritual and professional formation opportunities to help schools strengthen their Catholic identity.

The Office of Catechetics at Aquinas College will also continue to prepare catechists to teach the Catholic faith.

With a much smaller student body and tighter focus, but still offering both undergraduate and graduate degrees in education, Aquinas anticipates that it will retain its full accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools; its regular review is scheduled for next spring.

Since the public announcement of the college’s reconfiguration, Aquinas administrators have focused much of their energy on helping seniors finish out the semester and prepare to graduate, helping undergraduates get the credits they need to transfer, and assisting laid-off faculty and staff with their job searches.

There are still some unanswered questions about the reconfiguration, including how the campus will utilize or repurpose under-used buildings, especially the $10 million Siena Hall, the new dorm that was just completed last fall.

Even as Aquinas shrinks in size and scope, the Dominican Sisters are optimistic that their particular approach to teaching the faith will reach far beyond Nashville. “The congregation is sending Sisters out ... to urban Washington, D.C., to a new high school in the Diocese of Phoenix that serves primarily Hispanic students, to McEwen,” in rural middle Tennessee, said Sister Thomas More. “It’s a big spread.”

“Aquinas does an excellent job of preparing teachers as Catholic educators and helps them see their teaching ministry as a vocation,” said Sister Anne Catherine, O.P., principal of St. Cecilia Academy and former student at Aquinas.

Aquinas, she said, “is a small school, but we hope it will have an outsized influence on Catholic education.”

Aquinas College graduation

Aquinas College will close the academic year with graduation ceremonies on Saturday, May 13. The Baccalaureate Mass will be at 9 a.m. at the Cathedral of the Incarnation and will be immediately followed by the Awards Ceremony and Commencement.